Volume 10, No.5 - August 2001

Privatisation

Health and Safety

Make our workplaces safe and healthy
A comprehensive trade union approach to occupational health and safety

By Jacqueline Mpolokeng, COSATU Health and Safety Policy Co-ordinator

Health and safety legislation is a most important and necessary weapon to prevent injuries and diseases and promote health safety in the workplace and the community at large. But unless these laws are efficiently enforced, many employers will treat them casually and not comply with them.

A revolutionary and imaginative approach is needed to decide what sort of workplace health and safety services should be provided. This was made all more urgent following the introduction of 1993 Occupational Health and Safety Act (OHSA). Since January 1993, all employers have had a wide range of specific duties under Section 8 to ensure the health and safety of all their employees.

Section 8. (1) States: "Every employer shall provide and maintain, as far as is reasonably practicable, a working environment that is safe and without risk to the health of his employees". The general nature of this duty requires employers to make a closer examination of the specialist skills and resources which they should have at their disposal if they are to fulfil their legal obligations.

Although the Act implies that employers must provide or make use of the services of a range of occupational health and safety professionals, this is not stated explicitly.
That is however the understanding of health and safety practitioners, occupational health and safety conscious people and some trade unions - that providing healthy and safe working conditions depends overwhelmingly upon employers developing a comprehensive health and safety organisation.

This means that if employers are going to fulfil their broad responsibilities under the Act they need to employ, or have access to, a multi disciplinary team including occupational hygienists, health and safety officers, health and safety educators, safety engineers and other scientific and technical staff in health and safety field.

Workers need information
Besides their general duty under the OHSA to ensure the health and safety of all their employees, there are many other specific requirements in the Act that employers can only fulfil if they make use of appropriate occupational health and safety expertise.

For example, the Act requires the provision of extensive information on health and safety matters to all employees and their health and safety representatives. But many employers do not employ specialist health and safety staff who know what information exists.

There is a specific requirement to provide health and safety training for all employees. The response to this has been poor, largely because of a failure to employ enough adequately trained occupational health and safety training officers.

Employers Have a duty to prepare and make available a health and safety plan for making their workplaces healthy and safe. Again the response to this is poor. Many employers have either failed to comply or produced statements/policies so general as to be meaningless in practice.

Often this is because such statements/ policies have not been prepared by health and safety conscious staff and have not been subjected to bilateral discussions with workers' representatives.

Another important aspect of the OHSA is its insistence on employers providing workplace health and safety services. These include information on potentially dangerous articles and substances used at work under section 8. (e) And the servicing of health and safety representatives and the health and safety committee.

All these examples show that the OHSA cannot be implemented fully without the deployment of adequate health and safety expertise and organisation.

The Health and Safety Representatives and Establishment of Committees Acts, Sections 17, 18 & 19, can enable both the trade unions and health and safety providers to get organised to ensure that employers make work healthy and safe. The challenge now is to ensure that employers are obliged to get organised to meet their responsibilities to provide appropriate workplace health and safety services, conforming to minimum standards.

The functions of occupational health doctors, nurses, hygienists and health and safety representatives often overlap. This is inevitable because the primary function of all these groups is necessarily preventing accidents and diseases. It is neither possible nor desirable to make rigid distinctions between the precise concerns of each specialisation.

For example, because they deal with the effects of accidents, occupational physicians and nurses will inevitably become involved to a certain extent in prevention. Similarly, health and safety officers may become involved to a limited extent in environmental monitoring and hygienists and engineers have to co operate together in the control of exposure of workers to atmospheric contamination.

Prevention is the priority
The primary function of occupational health must be prevention. This means the principal tasks of occupational health staff must be recognising, evaluating and eliminating occupational health hazards at source, whether they be physical (accident hazards, ergonomic problems, noise, vibration, radiation, heat, light and so on.) chemical, biological or psychological (mental stress and fatigue).

The general duties faced by employers imply not only that occupational medical skills must be employed in a preventative role on a day-to-day basis but also that occupational health doctors, nurses and other health and safety personnel must have a key role in the planning of new plant and processes.

The OHSA requires a much greater preventative role for occupational health staff in eliminating hazards in workplaces before they arise. This does not deny that the main emphasis of preventative occupational health work must be in the day-to-day recognising, monitoring and, where possible, eliminating existing hazards.

Occupational health staff must, as a major part of their work, carry out regular inspections and monitoring of all aspects of the work environment, for example the monitoring of environmental conditions - noise, dust, thermal conditions, contact with chemicals and so on.

While many of these activities overlap, the code of conduct should attempt to differentiate between the medical, nursing and other specialist skills appropriate to various monitoring functions.

While clinical observation and screening must inevitably form an important part of occupational health practice, reliance on these methods for identifying occupational health problems assumes the acceptability of using the health of working people as an environmental indicator.

We need to develop a team approach on occupational health and safety services, seeing the functioning of individual medical, safety or hygiene personnel as part of a co-ordinated effort to identify, control, eliminate and evaluate occupational health and safety hazards.

The main work activity of the factory inspector is to inspect factories and other workplaces and to know exactly what to look for, the purpose and nature of the inspection and what kinds of knowledge and skills are needed during the inspection. An inspector's 'tool kit' has to include both mental tools - knowledge, skills and work experience - and physical tools - literature, measuring instruments, records, registries, etc.

A routine inspection must check whether the working conditions comply with the provisions of the law. The law defines healthy working conditions as those in which a worker can do his or her job the whole day without damaging his or her health.
The inspector need basic skills of understanding individual chapters of the Act and what they mean in practice, applied to the working environment, as part of the tool kit. For observing the working environment the inspector need a framework or classification of occupational hazards

To convince the employer to improve the working conditions, the inspector needs basic communication skills. If the working conditions do not comply with the Act, the inspector will give necessary instructions to the employer. If, after a follow- up inspection, nothing has happened, he/she has to adopt a stronger approach and resort to enforcement activity, which may mean a prosecution.

But does this happen in our country? We still have inspectors who are very lenient to employers and white racists that do not value workers' lives. Hazards at work must be prevented by correcting unsafe and unhealthy conditions, not by blaming the workers.
It is only the unions who can ensure that:

Without union involvement exerting pressure, employers often regard low health and safety standards as normal for the workplace. It is therefore up to us to protect ourselves. Pressure for improvements of working conditions will have to come from you, the workers.